Photo: Luigi Mangione/Instagram
The largest manhunt in recent U.S. history ended in the dining room of a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday morning.
It was there that police officers encountered a man hunched over a laptop who, when he pulled down a surgical mask, matched the description of the person wanted for gunning down a health-insurance executive in Manhattan, according to court documents. When the officers asked the man if he had been to New York recently, he “became quiet and began to shake.” After allegedly offering the officers a fake ID, he admitted he was, in fact, Luigi Mangione.
Mangione, 26, was denied bail during an initial court appearance that same evening, charged with two firearms counts and several other counts related to the fake ID. He has not been charged yet with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but at a press conference in Manhattan announcing the arrest, Mayor Eric Adams said that “we have a strong person of interest” following a five-day search.
A handwritten document described as a manifesto was recovered alongside a loaded gun, a silencer, and several fake IDs that officials say tie him to the murder. “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” the document stated, according to the New York Times, which reported it denounced UnitedHealthcare by name. When officers investigated the scene of Thompson’s murder, they found delay and deny scrawled on shell casings — terms often used by insurance companies when they deny patients’ claims. It was an early clue that Thompson, 50, was purposely killed in a potential act of vengeance against the nation’s largest insurer. The anger at the insurance industry was shared by a huge swath of the public, which reacted with sympathy for the killer, sometimes slipping into glee for the heinous crime.
Soon after his arrest, a portrait began to emerge of a young man born of privilege who veered down a path that authorities believe ended violently.
Mangione hails from an eminent Maryland family with ties to real estate and state politics. The Baltimore Banner reports that his family owns two recreational properties in the state and a group of nursing and assisted-living facilities they founded and where Mangione’s LinkedIn profile says he previously worked as a volunteer. Nino Mangione, a Republican Maryland delegate, told WBAL that he is Luigi’s cousin. Mangione attended the Gilman School, a private all-boys high school in Baltimore where tuition is more than $35,000 per year. Former teachers and classmates told the Washington Post they remembered the valedictorian as an exceedingly bright and well-liked student.
Mangione at the Gilman School in 2016.
Photo: Luigi Mangione/Facebook
In 2020, Mangione graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in engineering and computer science and, according to his LinkedIn profile, minored in mathematics with a concentration in artificial intelligence. According to a 2018 article in Penn Today, a university publication, he founded a club for video-game programmers as an undergraduate. “In high school, I started playing a lot of independent games and stuff like that, but I wanted to make my own game, and so I learned how to code,” Mangione, then a junior, told the publication. According to his LinkedIn profile, Magione had spent the past four years working as a data engineer for an online car retailer that is entirely remote.
He appears to have spent part of that period in Hawaii, where he posted on Instagram like a 20-something digital nomad, living at a co-working space called Surfbreak HNL in Honolulu. “Luigi was an incredibly thoughtful, compassionate human being. I had many long, deep conversations with him about not just the state of world affairs but things that we could do to improve society,” said the owner, R.J. Martin. “It’s like utter disbelief that it could have possibly been him, in the sense that when you talk about just a good human, like somebody that you’d be lucky to spend time with, somebody that was just thoughtful and had a good heart, that was definitely Luigi.”
Something seems to have changed in recent months. Martin told a Hawaii publication that his friend had suffered chronic back pain and texted him images after getting surgery before going “radio silent” over the summer. Asked in court if he was in contact with family, Mangione said “until recently.”
Mangione in Hawaii.
Photo: Luigi Mangione/Instagram
On X, he followed a variety of accounts befitting a typically online young man — self-help gurus like Andrew Huberman, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and “heterodox” thinkers such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, as well as Joe Rogan. His strongest interest by far is in the work of Tim Urban, a writer and illustrator popular with tech types who publishes science explainers and anti-woke political writing about how polarization is bad and rationalism can save the world.
There was one prominent exception to his innocuous online trail, though. Early this year, he favorably reviewed the book-length manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, a fellow math whiz better known as the Unabomber, who killed and maimed people he believed had ruined the world with technology. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” he wrote. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.” Mangione then quoted a “take I found online that I think is interesting,” which ended by saying “‘violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
The manifesto found on Mangione is said to have stated “these parasites had it coming.”
The massive manhunt began this past Wednesday morning at the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan, where Thompson was staying to attend a nearby business conference. At approximately 6:44 a.m. near the hotel’s doors, a hooded figure in a mask approached Thompson from behind and opened fire. After tapping the back of the weapon apparently to clear a jam, the gunman pursued his prey for several steps, firing at least once more. With Thompson fatally wounded, the gunman then crossed the street and took off on a zigzag course on a bicycle through midtown and Central Park before the trail went cold at the bus terminal in upper Manhattan. Within a few hours, he had eluded the nation’s largest police department, which has access to thousands of cameras, and disappeared.
Officers investigate the scene of Thompson’s murder this past Wednesday.
Photo: Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images
Police officers and detectives scoured the getaway route for footage, working backward to create a timeline of the lead-up to the crime in the hopes of unmasking the killer. They discovered the gunman had arrived in the city ten days earlier from an interstate bus that originated in Atlanta, Georgia. He then checked into an Upper West Side hostel on November 30, using a fake New Jersey ID that officials say was later found on Mangione. It was there that he briefly let his guard down, lowering his face mask to reportedly flirt with a person working the front desk. The moment was captured by a security camera. On December 4, the day of the shooting, the masked man had been spotted at a Starbucks a few blocks away from the Hilton. He discarded a water bottle and a protein bar from which police obtained a smudged fingerprint and DNA.
After leaving Central Park, the gunman hailed a taxi and headed to the bus terminal, but not before a camera looking into the backseat captured another image of his face. The NYPD immediately released the photos in hopes of identifying the suspect, and, 300 miles away in a McDonald’s, an employee recognized a man inside as the same one in the photos owing to his distinctive features, such as thick eyebrows. Jessica Tisch, the new NYPD commissioner, credited “the greatest detectives in the world” for gathering the evidence that led to Mangione.
Still, he was not identified by law enforcement until his arrest nearly a week after he allegedly opened fire in the middle of the nation’s most heavily surveilled city. During a press conference following the court appearance, the head of the Pennsylvania State Police said Mangione had crisscrossed the state by bus from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. During that time, the official said, he kept a low profile and tried to avoid more cameras.
With additional reporting by John Herrman and Andrew Rice
